 Live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high-tech coverage, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2019. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back inside the Moscone Center. We're here in Moscone North wrapping up our coverage here at VMworld 2019. Glad to have you with us here on theCUBE as we continue our 10th consecutive year of coverage here of the event. Stu Miniman along with John Walls, joined now by Rob Emsley, who is the director of data protection, product marketing at Dell EMC. Rob, good to see you, sir. Hey, John. Saw you almost when I walked, you were the first person I saw when I walked in the room the other day. You were. And now you're one of the last. I know. And Efri Natalshai, who is the director of data protection and cloud native apps at Dell EMC. Efri, good to see you, sir. Good to see you. Yeah, first off, let's just talk about the world of data protection in general here. Everybody's talking multi and hybrid and all these things. Your world's changing a little bit, right? Because of these new environments and these new opportunities. So if you could just paint that 30,000 foot picture first of thematically how your world is evolving. Yeah, I mean, I think the keyword in data protection is data. And I think that wherever it is created and wherever it is managed, customers need to look after it. You know, there's the old adage that there's only two things that customers worry about. One is their employees and two is their data. So as we've seen the adoption of cloud as an infrastructure model, and you're starting to see many customers extend their on-premises infrastructure to the cloud and using the cloud for production level applications, they realize that, and often they're told, you got to do something about your data. So that's led to all vendors, especially ourselves, over the last several years, really expanding the portfolio and the capabilities that we have from a non-premises centric environment to the multi-cloud. Yeah, so every, a lot of discussion about Kubernetes, before we get into that, you've got cloud native in your title. And Rob talked about data and talked about the applications. I'm hoping you can bring us inside as to, what's different when we're talking about cloud native applications that from a data protection standpoint, what do you have to think about differently? Is it the microservices, architecture and containers fundamentally change the way things are done? Is it similar to what we've done in the past? Definitely, we see customers, some customers are taking what they have right now and they move it into cloud native infrastructure. A lot of customers are building new applications and new workloads and they build it on top of new applications. So they basically build a whole new set of applications and infrastructure and want to combine them together. And they come to us and ask us, how do I protect this? And these things spin up, spin down, move around. They have very different life cycle than the traditional applications. Yeah, it's funny. Rob, I think back to, it's like tape, how we dealt this because of environment versus disk versus containerized application. Boy, by the time I want to set something up, isn't that gone? And things move around all over the place. It's got to put different types of environments than you need to span all of these. I was chatting with Efri earlier and we were talking about, well, what's changed kind of in the last couple of years around the deployment and usage of Kubernetes, the deployment of containers. And Efri was saying that one of the most fundamental changes is the introduction of persistent volumes. And as soon as persistency comes into the mix, that's where things start to change and Efri's phone started ringing with respect to, hey, what are you doing to bring data protection into this environment? I think two years ago everything was said to be stateless. And then suddenly people understood that's not enough. You need to add some state to existing applications. And then the notion of persistent volumes came along and then customers and developers saw that it's actually working quite nicely and they started relying more and more and moving more state into their applications running on containers environments. So the first thing that customers ask us about is where do I store my data? Where's the primary volume that is done by our storage folks? The next question is how do I protect my data? And this is where we come into the picture and we offer an architecture that is built for containerized environment and takes care of that lifecycle that we talked about before. Containers are coming and going. You need to protect the data and the containers, the data and the metadata together in order to bring that protection level that customers looks for. As the concerns about data protection have been elevated now and see sweet discussions now. Has that created a different approach or maybe a change of tone or tenor from your clients to you because the discussions are being elevated in their own businesses and so there's, is there a different kind of attention being paid to this or different kinds of concerns than maybe three, four years ago? Yeah, I mean it's interesting. I mean one of the things we run every couple of years is a global study. We call it the Global Data Protection Index. This year we interviewed 2200 IT decision makers and we kind of asked them about how are they valuing data protection and also how are they valuing data? And the one thing that has definitely changed is that the value of data to them has become more critically important. I think it's always been important but I think as they start thinking about data as capital, they are starting to realize that it's only capital if you've got it. If you don't have it, it's nothing to you. And it's only yours if you have it. Well, yeah. Right and nobody else. Oh, absolutely. Right. That would be good there, dear. Every Kubernetes course is open source and everybody's got what they're doing in it. You've got an announcement, some work you're doing with VMware. It's open source also. Bring us inside a little bit Valero. How did we get to this point? Part of the CNCF yet, kind of being submitted or how does that fit into the whole community? Yeah, sure. So as you said and we talked about it earlier this week with Beth and people at Data Protection Announcements. We are working with collaboration with Valero, now part of VMware, in order to bring that data protection solution. So Valero is an open source project. It's out there in the open. You have thousands of stars, GitHub stars, very popular among the DevOps community about Kubernetes users. You can hear about it from customers that are looking for solutions. Valero is very good at backing up cluster containers and applications. And we have a lot of experience in enterprise data protection, making sure that you have a solution that has compliance reporting. You can track your data. You can define policies scheduling, all of that. So we are combining these two and collaborating with Valero in order to have a solution that answers both the needs of the backup admin. And they just want to go home knowing that their production environment is protected. And the DevOps people and the Kubernetes administrators, and they just want to get a volume and forget about data protection, everybody can work in their environment with the tools that they know, with the permissions that they want, and they can both work together and be happy. And the companies that we work with are the ones that have good relationship between the DevOps team and the backup administrators. And they sit at the same table and talk to us, and everybody tells us what they want and what they need. And as a result, we build a solution so that we'll be able to answer the needs of both of them. So do you have to build, sometimes those relationships within a company to get them to talk or collaborate in a more conducive environment? Because you see all kinds, right? I mean, you see the full range. You just talked about that, Afri, that some very successful, some very constructive, maybe some that aren't on the same page. And so that's almost part of your responsibility to come in before you even get to where, you can talk about the work, we've got to talk about the collaboration, that they're not there yet. We usually come when there is a story. People try to move their applications to production. The developers are already working on something, and now the developers want volumes and the IT ops, people tell them, no, no, no, if you can't protect it, according to our rules, we'll not pass the audit. We can do that for you. And that creates a friction inside those teams. In the organization that we talked with, there is recognition of that already, and now they come together to the table and they want to hear something that would, they would be able to work with us, both on the management, on the IT ops and the management on cube control and what DevOps people are using. And it's large companies that are coming and talking to us. I think when you get the large companies, quite often you have some more of these different fiefdoms of users inside, but because they're large companies, they have certain requirements from a regulations and compliance perspective. So they have those concerns, and every has been saying, as we look at the early design partners, customers that we're looking to work with, they're big companies that are coming to us. Rob, can you just help us understand? We talked about Valero there, so some open softwares, does the PowerTek just sit on top of that? Yeah, so, yeah, it's a great question. So, you know, as you know, we introduced PowerTek software at Dell Technologies World. It started shipping to customers at the end of July, and Kubernetes support is really the first example of what we said that we were going to be able to do, which is more rapidly bring new workload and new capabilities into our PowerTek software offering than we've ever been able to do before. You know, we're really embarking on a quarterly release cadence, you know, which will allow us to, you know, to do things that, you know, in our existing portfolio, our release cadence has often been measured in many, many months and quite often, as long as a year and beyond. So what we will do is the tech preview that we announced this week, you know, we will roll that out in an upcoming release in production, and that will become available to, you know, any of the PowerTek software users. So, you know, right within the PowerTek software management interface, you know, that has the VMware support, Oracle, SQL and file systems will add the additional workload support of being able to protect Kubernetes, using the same workloads, the abilities to create protection policies. And I'm interested, Efri, is with protection policies, because as you were saying about how the environment can change quite rapidly, is that by using a policy, you don't need to watch for those changes. As changes happen, the policy will keep track of what it needs to do as far as protecting those new applications as they come up and as they go away. Yeah, what happens is the ones who define the policies are the RT operations and the backup admins, they want to comply with the rules that they have and they define the gold, silver, bronze policies, whatever have you, and then they can give it to the Kubernetes admins, and the Kubernetes admins can say, okay, these are my volumes, these are my applications, I will just use kubectl and annotate those objects. We will discover that, we'll automatically create a schedule that would create that backup. So in essence, the Kubernetes admin doesn't really need to care about the compliance rules, they need to care about policies, and the backup admin can take care of all the rest. And the applications are driving the policies and not the other way around. Yeah, I mean, the Kubernetes admins are used to defining policies in terms of how they provision their storage, for example, we want to do the same in the data protection area. So as far as things like retention periods, as far as whether or not the data needs to be replicated, whether or not the data needs to be tiered to the cloud. Those are all things that the IT admin team can do, and it sort of separates kind of, so orchestration and governance is a big part of Parapax X software. Yeah, Rob, what I'd love to get your viewpoint on is data protection historically was not one of the faster moving things in the IT realm. Last two or three years at VMworld, it's been one of the hottest topic. I said, the keynote on Monday felt like we were at Kubernetes world, not quite KubeCon just yet, because there's a lot of projects there, but I walked down to the show floor, and it's not storage world like the last day, it's data protection world, big booths, lots of glowing parties for all these people, so customers, they embracing change, and what's that mean for your portfolio? Yeah, I mean, it's interesting, I mean, I think over the years, if you think about where'd you go if you want to learn about data protection, VMworld is probably one of the best shows to go to, because we're all here. I mean, as you know, I've been crazy enough to be in the data protection business for almost 15 years now, and it hasn't changed. If you want to talk to data protection vendors, then VMworld is a really good show to go to. I think that for us, what VMworld has done is it's provided a common foundation, and that's also providing a common foundation to get us from on premises into the multi-cloud environment, so once you develop great data protection solutions in the VMworld environment, is that your target market becomes quite broad, because there's so much VMworld virtualization out there in the market, but now you're absolutely correct, is that you walk the show floor, and it's an interesting site. I think in addition to that, we also have a lot of, obviously, Kubernetes in the show, and I think what we have seen over the last couple of years is that customers were coming to us asking for solutions, and this is why we were able, with the PowerProtect architecture and platform, to innovate more quickly and respond to those fast-changing trends, because now you have persistency of volumes, now you have protection. VMware acquired Heptail. We could work together on creating that solution. Yeah, absolutely. We've been at the KubeCon show for a number of years. Heptail, of course, had a presence last year. VMware had a bigger presence, but that maturation of the storage component was something we knew would take time. We'd watched it in the virtualization world. Those of us that lived through that 10 to 15 years ago, and containerization, it's starting to reach that maturity, and we're hitting that inflection point. And if you also want to think about the announcement Pat made on the keynote on Monday, where he said we are going to work much more with PowerProtect to address data protection capabilities, this is one of the things we are collaborating with the Heptail team. We are contributing to the open source. We are building together things that can move in the pace of Kubernetes and address the needs of our more legacy companies that need data protection with compliance. So, Rob, that'll keep you in business for another 15 years. I hope so. I hope so. Gentlemen, thanks for the time. Thank you. We appreciate that, especially on your birthday, right? Oh, tomorrow. Tomorrow, right? I'm sorry, or tomorrow on your birthday, should be home for that, but happy early birthday. Thank you very much. We should have a cube cake. You should, especially at the end of the day. I know, I know. Well, end of the day, we come up with something better than a cake. That's for sure. Hey, gentlemen, thank you again. We appreciate it. Thanks, John. We'll be back in a little bit streaming the continuing coverage here. VMworld 2019 with some final thoughts from our panelists just a little bit. See you all on the other side for that.